Reflections on interviewing foreign elites: praxis, positionality, validity, and the cult of the insider

Using open-ended interviews to conduct research on foreign elites raises me thodological questions which conducting research on non-foreign elites and foreign non-elites does not. In this paper I first reflect upon some of the practical issues I have encountered when conducting interviews with member s of foreign elites: I then examine the issue of positionality to suggest t hat the dualism of "insider" knowledge and status Versus "outsider" knowled ge and status is not as stable as it is often assumed to be, and that it sh ould not be presumed that an "insider" will necessarily produce "better" kn owledge than will an "outsider" simply by dint of their positionality. Inde ed, given that the interview process is about constructing social meaning - a process that involves both the researcher and the source - in many ways such a dualism is meaningless. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights re served.